THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE (33 page)

With no present proof that "hard copies" of the classified data have been made, the charges against Artarmon could be dropped.

Senator Cliff Moore (Dem, New Hampshire) will undoubtedly use the incident to bolster his campaign for the introduction of federal legislation to counter the nation's escalating trend of computer crime. Of course the ...  

Goldman tossed the paper aside and slumped back in his seat. 'Jesus, Steve!' He rubbed his thighs and looked toward the ceiling like a church-going supplicant. He could hardly believe what he'd read. A vortex opened up inside him and the cocktail lounge broke apart as if it were a computerized construct. He clamped his eyes shut and gripped the table for support. He swallowed hard and looked about the room. It was as before, though a nub of nausea had taken root in his stomach. He looked this way and that, groping for a modicum of stability, for a mental anchor to keep himself in check. So much had happened since Friday night and the fallout seemed unending. Of course he didn’t want anyone hurt by his actions (actions which in hindsight were patently reckless) and yet people had been hurt all the same. According to the newspaper article, Artarmon was now behind bars.

Goldman chewed his thumbnail and felt irretrievably damned, as if never able to right the wrong that had crashed into his life like the ravaging waters of a collapsed weir. Knowing General Turner's corruptness was behind what had taken place did little to assuage the chemist's growing sense of guilt. He was nothing if not blameworthy. He gazed about the cocktail lounge and could only pray the charges against Artarmon would be dropped.

An attractive Mulatto woman with close-cropped blond hair sat at a nearby table. She winked suggestively at Goldman before lighting a cigarette. A balding man in his fifties, a crumpled beige suit clinging to his dumpy frame, dropped into a seat beside her. The woman pulled away from him as he caressed her chin with the familiarity of recent intimacy. She shot a pleading glance at Goldman as if wanting to be rescued from the mauling advances of the older man.

'I feel wonderful,' Michelle said tipsily. She made to sit down and nearly lost balance. Once seated, she lit a Salem and ordered another round of
Orange Orgasms
from the tight-skirted waitress who'd appeared at the table. 'Scott, I love it over here. I
really
do.' She cast him a playful look and rubbed her foot against his leg. 'If everything works out, we can go to LA soon, right? I can't wait to see my friend Sandy. She says we can stay any time we want.'

Goldman favoured her with a “of course you can, babe, you're with me” look. From the corner of his eye he saw the Mulatto woman look resentfully at Michelle. A moment later the woman scanned the lounge as if looking for a single man. She butted her cigarette in an ashtray, all the while her older companion whispered in her ear.

Michelle bobbed her head and whistled gaily to the piano player's song. Goldman found it difficult to share her heightened mood, haunted as he was by the newspaper article. General Turner had put a whole new spin on the affair. Most likely he would use every law enforcement and intelligence agency at his disposal. Goldman tensed from the enormity of his enemy's stores. He couldn't tell Michelle what he'd just read in the newspaper. Again he didn't have it in him to be completely honest.

A disheartening confusion threatened to derail him. He didn't know which way to turn. All roads led to the troubled core of his hurting. Like a long-time substance abuser, he wanted nothing more than to block out the insufferable pain coursing through his veins like corrosive acid. Consequently he was driven to drink more than his usual when out on the town.

He polished off his
Orange Orgasm
before Michelle finished hers. Hardly a drinker, he nevertheless kept pace with Michelle who seemed more adept at late-night drinking.

And so the couple made a night of it.

After the Nightline Lounge, they went to the Top of the Mark, and from there on to the Starlight Roof. They ended up at Mabuhay Gardens where some up-and-coming punk band smashed beer bottles on stage. In the early hours they checked into Hotel Misaki, and once bedded in their room made love with the reckless abandon alcohol afforded. No sooner had they pulled apart than sleep overcame them. The much-needed end to another day on the road.

TWENTY-SIX

Tuesday, 28th October 1980.

Goldman woke early with less of a hangover than expected. Even so he was disorientated by his surroundings. He rubbed his eyes and took in the room's cane walls, shoji screens and indoor rock-garden. The rock-garden's niches were home to delicate flowers, tiny jade statues and ceramic bowls painted with Asian calligraphy. He focused on a sunken Japanese-style furo bath. Neatly folded kimonos and a selection of bath salts in slender glass bottles were carefully arranged along the bath's rocked-in edge. The careful positioning of the room's objects reminded him of the mind-calming effect of a Zen pebble garden at a Los Angeles Buddhist Temple he'd once visited with Rachel (not that his alcohol-clouded mind this morning was a willing repository for anything aesthetic). Still, he was happy to have woke in the room.

He got up from the tatami-mat bed in which Michelle still slept. He looked down at her and admired her graceful repose on the pillow. He walked onto the balcony outside and greeted the waking day. Seagulls wheeled across a gray featureless sky and his future seemed as defined as the early-morning mists cloaking the city.

Michelle drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and glanced unknowingly at Alcatrez Island. 'That's Alcatrez Island Prison,' Goldman said. 'In its heyday it catered for some of America's finest: Machine Gun Kelly, Al Capone – '

'So where's Carl's place,' she asked from behind the wheel, keen to change the subject.

'In Mill Valley, not that far.'

They exited the sweeping span of the Golden Gate Bridge and made their way into Marin County. Before long they followed leisurely traffic through Sausalito. Michelle was taken by the town's idyllic setting. Sailboats dotted a shimmering bay and tourists and shoppers milled about colourful souvenir shops, pricey art galleries and factory-cost clothing boutiques. Tall pines and verdant foliage greeted the couple as they motored through Tamalpais Valley. They had little cause for complaint (apart from mild hangovers) and all up thought it a wonderful day to be alive. Amidst a redwood forest outside Mill Valley, they turned off a two-lane blacktop and drove down a narrow, twisting road. Before long they engaged a rutted dirt road, and the rented Datsun held its own on the two-kilometre stretch.

'Just here,' Goldman said.

Michelle braked before a wood-shingle letterbox. She gunned the car up a short steep drive before parking under a large sycamore tree. They climbed out of the ticking sedan and straightened hair and clothes. Before them was a split-level mud brick house, its covered walkways leading to several detached dwellings. To the left of the slate-roofed house was a three-walled aluminum shed. A flourish of green sleeper lined its facing end wall. The long metal shed housed a new-model Chrysler, a Chevrolet pickup, a Massey Ferguson tractor, forty-four gallon drums of petrol and diesel, and a wooden workbench which was home to a variety of electrical and mechanical tools. Close by the bench, horse saddles were perched on a holding rail. In the dimness of a nearby pottery studio, Goldman made out a makeshift kiln, a pair of potter's wheels, and a number of unglazed pots and vases on wood and steel holding racks.

'Scott, old buddy.' Carl Friedman strolled towards his visitors, his rustic home behind him, his bearded face creased from a welcoming smile. Though broad-shouldered and fit from maintaining his rural acreage, he carried a tired expression that unflatteringly belied his thirty-eight years, even as his restless eyes spoke of mental acuity. The two men hugged. Goldman introduced Michelle. Friedman brightened upon saying her name and accepted her offered hand, and Michelle seemed to take comfort from his genuine manner.

Slanting beams of forest light played across the trio as they walked towards Friedman's mud brick home, the men loud and lively from meeting again. Goldman glanced at Michelle as she made a playful face at an inquisitive brown squirrel peering down at her from a nearby beech tree.

A stand of pines silhouetted against a swath of twinkling stars was the nighttime view presented to Goldman as he pressed against the pentagonal window in Carl Friedman's dining room. He sensed the stillness of the woods outside and couldn't recall when he'd last spent a night in the country. The sound of his name broke his reverie. He turned towards the candle-lit table behind him and took his place alongside Michelle, Carl Friedman, Carl's wife Marlene and the Friedmans' eight year old daughter Tandy.

A dinner of chilly-bean lasagne, home garden salad and sticks of garlic bread was readily consumed – much to Tandy's dismay, as she was of late a voraciously hungry girl invariably keen for more than her share.

'So,' Friedman said, 'the debate's on tonight, for what it's worth.' He picked at a tooth with his thumbnail. 'Should be good for a laugh.' He poured himself more wine. 'I dare say Reagan's used to acting. Certainly made enough B-grades in his time.'

'Give the man some credit,' Marlene said, brushing aside a stray lock of auburn hair.

'Why?' Friedman asked with a testy undertow. Marlene picked at specks of dried food on the tablecloth. The thirty-nine year old had aged well, in spite of being a prolific artist perennially frustrated by her work. Her abstract canvasses were a particular source of consternation, but nonetheless fetched handsome prices in a string of North Californian galleries.

She sighed and answered her husband's blunt query with the factual terseness she felt it deserved. 'Because any half-wit knows Reagan's anti-inflationary policies, his promises to relieve taxes and regulation, are sorely needed after the economic blundering of the Carter administration ...'

Friedman looked down and mumbled unintelligibly at his dinner plate. Marlene stopped her economic homily and gave her husband a frosty look that spoke of later bedside dispute. Goldman sensed the tension between the couple ran far deeper than the politics voiced.

'Is there any dessert?' Tandy asked in a hopeful tone, while banging her tiny palms on the table for attention. Marlene stared coolly ahead and swallowed more wine. She slapped her glass down and red beads of wine spattered the table cloth. She began collecting the dinner plates, thought the better of it, and retreated to the kitchen with her sloshing wineglass instead.

Scott and Michelle cast nervy glances at one another.

'Will you play Snakes and Ladders with me?' Tandy looked across the cluttered table at Michelle. 'Please.' She jumped down from her seat, her long-lashed eyes bright with anticipation.

'Okay,' Michelle said with a grin. 'Go get the board while I pop outside for a tic.'

And light me up a Salem
, Goldman thought sardonically.

'Yippee!' Tandy skipped away with all the gaiety of childish pursuit.

'Listen Scott, why don't you watch the debate,' Friedman suggested, one eyebrow raised like a shrewd barrister, 'and I'll go over what you brought me.' He glanced uneasily towards the kitchen. 'Give me an hour or so and I'll tell you what I think.'

Goldman drained his glass, sat back and smiled. 'Sounds fine by me.'

Seated on a brown corduroy divan, Goldman watched the televised presidential debate. Jimmy Carter stood behind a podium and edged cautiously about the just brought up topic of the hostage crisis. With rehearsed polemic, Ronald Reagan criticized the Carter administration's inability to secure the release of 52 US hostages held by the Ayatollah Khomeini's fundamentalist government in Iran.

Goldman glanced at Michelle curled beside him on the divan, hands tucked between her legs and all but asleep (the previous night's drinking responsible for her lassitude – not that Goldman didn't feel under the weather himself). In the kitchen Tandy had roped her mother into another game of Snakes and Ladders, and their noisy employment of the board was sometimes heard over the sounds of the television.

Ronald Reagan was now rounding off, exalting how his administration would tackle inflation, unemployment, Iran and the Soviets. He decried Washington DC as the symbol of the Big Government Dragon he was determined to slay.

Goldman wanted to check in on Friedman. He glanced again at Michelle as she took rest in an orbit far removed from the pressures of her former world. He got up quietly and knocked on the fluted pine door of Friedman's study. After hearing a muffled grunt from inside and interpreting the sound as consent for entry, Goldman slid the door to.

He wasn't prepared for what he saw.

Friedman fumbled with a glass and steel hypodermic syringe as he drew blood from a bluish vein. 'Jesus Christ, you'll put me in a premature grave bursting in like that!'

Goldman turned aside.

'What's the matter with you?' Friedman chuckled and pushed the plunger to the hilt. He pulled the needle out of his arm and contained the minute flow of blood with a surgical swab. Goldman wasn't able to hide his shocked expression.

'Don't worry, it's not narcotics,' Friedman said, openly amused by Goldman's stiff reaction. The UC biochemistry graduate cleaned his reusable syringe in a stainless steel pan of isopropyl alcohol. 'It's a little cocktail I use to counteract free radical alteration of DNA and RNA. L-glutathione and superoxide dismutase are the strongest antioxidants known. Unfortunately both substances are broken down by the digestive tract – hence the need to inject them molecularly intact into the bloodstream.'

Goldman nodded hesitantly while digesting the information; but Friedman's solemn expression as he finished cleaning his glass syringe cleared away any doubt.
So
Carl's on some
life-extension program.
Goldman released a short, nervy laugh. 'Jeez, I thought you'd hit junkie-bottom, catching you out like that.'

Friedman pushed his articles aside and leaned back in his seat. 'For Christ's sake, Scott, loosen up.' His forehead creased with concern. 'You've been damn uptight ever since you got here.'